The German author and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger was the oldest of four brothers born to middle-class parents in the Bavarian city of Kaufbeuren. He grew up in Nuremberg, completed his education in Nördlingen after the war and went on to read literature and philosophy in Erlangen, Freiburg, Hamburg and Paris. He took his doctoral degree in 1955 with a thesis on the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano to whom he would return some thirty years later. Enzensberger became a member of Gruppe 47 the same year. When he edited the radio show Radio Essay between 1955 and 1957, his outspoken social criticism provoked the German author and radio editor Alfred Andersch to call him an "angry young man".